This is one of my favorite poems and also, for a few years in the late nineties, one of my favorite songs. Enjoy, and please comment, its how art improves.

Jethro Tull – My God[play] [buy]

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Loosen up this sieve,
I’d like some cake before I go.
Dry wells don’t serve much purpose do they?
The bell that rings at midnight is heard by no one truly good.

The piano enters and the dirge begins.
The empty lights shine on our religion like specters on graves.
Everything is all that you can see.
You are the god of nothing but the inside of your own mangled corpse.

Rotting worms eat into the threads that hold you in this life, and you are cut free.

Hurtling downward, you see the Inferno raging below you,
But you pass it, moving towards something deeper, something far worse,
You think that all those Christians that went before you must have had quite a shock
When they saw their precious Hell wasn’t as bad as they thought.

Just as you begin to fear you were the worst person on earth,
The ride stops, and you sit there in the darkness.
And you hear voices chanting the darkness around you,
And you see flashes of color when they do.

Then silence again,
And then silence,
And then silence,
And then silence,
And then silence,
And then a change…
You start to rise,
And then you realize that motion is nothing,
And then noise surrounds you.
And you are back in the waking world,
And you get up in the morning,
And move about your daily chores,
And do your homework like a good student,
And you clean up after your dog, and your cat, and your birds,
And you go to church on Sundays,
And you don’t complain, because you are too young to know any better,
And you figure your vision was just a dream come from reading too much philosophy,
And you lay off that for a bit,
Until one day you wake up as an adult, and realize you are an idiot.

You pray to your God that its not too late,
But it is,
And you die a stupid fool,
And you are buried,
And the worms bite through your last ties to the earth,
And you descend through the darkness towards Hell,
And pass it,
And then stop,
And then silence,
And then silence,
And then silence.

Written on December 6th at 12am while slightly sick, and listening to Jethro Tull – My God.